Podcast E15: Woman: Understand Your Guilt

In podcast E15, Mette Miriam Sloth discusses the guilt that many women experience today. She particularly highlights the impact that social media and the constant flow of information have on women.

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  The main points of the podcast are:

  Guilt can feel like an enemy invading our lives. It can arise in many different situations and fill our thoughts and feelings enormously.

  Motherhood can exacerbate guilt. When we become mothers, the complexity of our lives increases, and we can feel inadequate in many situations.

  Social media, especially Instagram, can contribute to guilt. We are bombarded with images of perfect lives and different opinions on how to be a mother, partner, and human being. This can lead to doubt and a feeling of being wrong.

  It is important to have a good anchor in yourself and know your values. When we know who we are and what is important to us, we are less affected by the opinions and choices of others.

  Notice how you feel when you are on social media or seeking information. If you experience negative emotions, it may be an indication that you should limit your exposure or change your habits.

  Guilt can be a guide to understanding what is important to us. It can show us which areas of our lives we may want to change or explore.

  Be curious about your feelings and allow yourself to feel them fully. Instead of suppressing or ignoring the guilt, you can use it to get to know yourself better and grow as a human being.

  Take responsibility for your own feelings and actions. Instead of blaming others for your guilt, you can work to understand and manage your own reactions.

  It is harder to reject the guilt of others than to deal with your own. But it is important to learn to set boundaries and protect yourself from the negative projections of others.

  The more we work on our own personal development, the more sensitive we become to the feelings of others. This can make it more difficult to be with people who do not take responsibility for their own feelings and actions.

  We have the right to say no thank you and go our own way. It is not selfish to set boundaries and prioritize our own needs.

  Love and freedom are inextricably linked. To experience true love in our relationships, it is important to give both ourselves and others the freedom to be who they are.

  Mette Miriam Sloth also gives a number of concrete tips on how to deal with guilt:

  Follow the feeling to the end: Examine what lies behind the guilt. Is there something you need to act on, or is it just noise you need to ignore?

  Change state: Do something that brings you joy and peace. It can be moving the body, listening to music, watching a funny movie, or spending time with good friends.

  Be curious and caring towards yourself: Remember that it takes time to change old patterns. Celebrate your progress and be patient with yourself when you stumble.

  Podcast E15 provides a thought-provoking insight into the guilt that many women experience today. Mette Miriam Sloth's advice and insights can help women understand, manage, and overcome the negative spiral of self-blame and doubt.

• Transcript

  Translated transcript of the original Danish podcast

  Host: Mette Miriam Sloth

  But the thing about a guilty conscience is that it can take up a lot of space. I mean, it's almost as if if you have a day where you're walking around doing whatever it is you're doing and you're having a good time in life and feeling good, you know, that when something happens that activates the guilty conscience, you actually go from feeling alive and being ok and happy or doing something to it hitting you, so it simply hits you like a knot in your stomach or like a chill in your whole system. And that's why I actually talk a lot about Dorid. I was actually on the radio umm and there I'm like with Marie Sloma who does something like Help me parents and it was actually there with was it Freja I was in with no it was I can't even remember now I think it was it doesn't matter but there we just talked about the bad well I think it was Frej fral I was with someone and you can find it as a podcast there so you just google radio 4 ø help you parents and then look through the episode then you will see one about bad conscience. And that's when I kind of realised when we were talking about it that God, yes, it's really something that takes up a lot of space in meetings, especially with women and meetings in particular. And when you're hit by a guilty conscience or if it's something you're struggling with, it feels like an enemy. So it can feel like something you really want to avoid getting rid of and so once and for all I can get a pill I can get it surgically removed I can do something to get rid of it once and for all because it can feel so invasive. And I've even had, well, I've also had women in counselling, both in terms of personal development meetings or crisis management or just teams, whatever it is. And I can also see that some women are visited by a guilty conscience more than others. And some women, and what can happen is that if the guilty conscience has crept in, it can seem to be a bit of a downward spiral. You can almost feel guilty about feeling guilty. It can feel as if it's like it's on its own, and therefore it can start to take up a lot of space. It can also happen when you become a mum, maybe for the first time. And of course, it can also appear when you have more children. You may feel guilty that you don't think you have enough time for all the children. It can come in different forms, but it's also like it can really show up once you're up there and in your mum stage. There's like an extra dimension to being a woman and also being a mum, which can just make this bad thing that it just becomes much bigger. And one of the reasons for that is that when you become a mum, your complexity around being in the world is increased. Because all of a sudden, all of a sudden, it's like you can't, um, you'll be in a lot of potential conflictual situations. You'll find yourself in situations where you might not feel like you're hitting your stride. And there are many reasons for that. And on top of that, we need to live in a culture where we can be online. 247. Our nervous system hasn't been used to that. So it's quite new. It is new. I'm kind of a dying dinosaur. I think I'm from 79, born in 79. That is, I got my first mobile phone when I was around 2022 or something like that. Um, and you could say that getting a mobile phone at that time was actually because I worked at Sonofon. I was part of that sonofon wave that was right around the time when mobile phones became commonplace if any of you can remember depending on. And we would say born maybe five to ten years later than me, so it's a little bit closer to you having internet and stuff like that very early in your life. But you could say now that we can be on 247 and have our children, they are the first generation to live in a time when being on the internet or being able to be online all 247 is something you are from cradle to grave. And it's not just about being able to be on the internet, it's also about exposure. Because I know that women love a lot of media, so you could say that if you look at What are women's favourite media? And I still think so right now, without me being so I can also be a bit biased because I'm not on social media that much myself. I primarily use social media as a sharing platform. I share the knowledge I have with those who might be interested and I post when I have some kind of lecture or something that people can buy into, if they want to. So that's actually the way I primarily use social media. And then of course there's also something, and then I also use it myself for search information. But I know that many women are very visually stimulated by Instagram, for example. Because there's a lot of aesthetics, there's a lot of beauty. There can be a lot of sharing tips about the home, and there can also be sharing knowledge about children and basically also sharing the relational. Because women have a very strong drive to be in communities. And you could say that some of that community has moved a bit into the virtual space. So we can sometimes feel a little more isolated and perhaps miss a bit of community because people work there and we move away from our own and stuff like that. And so some of the community has moved out virtually. And that's not all bad. That's why it can be challenging. I often have women in concentration whose guilty conscience is also activated when they are on social media and seeking knowledge in general. Because right now there is simply so much knowledge available. And there are so many people who speak their truth, what they stand for. And the way they view the world, they view life, they view relationships. They share that. Whether they want to turn it into a business or whether they do it as an influencer or they do it as whatever it is. And it's not so much to have a judgement on it. It's more that when you look at a topic, let's say you're just looking at sleep in relation to a child. Well, you can go all the way from one branch to the other and say that the child should just be left alone. So you could go all the way to the child should never be left alone. You get the whole scaling of how we can kind of approach the world. So it means that when you start to take an interest in something, for example with children and also around How do we make it more sustainable? How do we, you know, whatever is going on in our age, you're also bombarded with different opinions. You're bombarded with different ways of living life. And that can confuse you enormously. And it can also make you feel guilty, because you think, God, if she always bakes her own buns, I won't do that. Or god, they go travelling and backpacking and kids. I've got to see the world and stuff, but I can't afford it and I don't want to, and that's the bad thing. So that's the whole thing. And they've got new wallpaper and stuff. I haven't done anything to my home in 100 years. And maybe it's also because it can see something creative. So you know you can be constantly bombarded with things that someone does differently than you. And here we just have to recognise what it is to be human. One of the hardest things about being human is actually dealing with diversity. It's something that some of us find enormously curious. How exciting that there are so many variants. But there's also something in us that when we see something that's different from ourselves, we can start to doubt. Either we have to say you're wrong because if you're not doing something different from what I'm doing then either I must be wrong or you must be wrong. And what can often happen if you struggle with a guilty conscience is that you very often make yourself wrong. It's another form of behaviour to say: ‘Well, you're always wrong, you know, because I'm right.’ Then it's a different kind, it's a different kind of defence. And of course, we can all have that too, right? And it doesn't matter that you see, you observe something. Someone who lives in a certain way and says: ‘No, okay, fine, all due respect, you make that choice, I choose something else.’ But if you're completely clarified there, if you really stand for, you're very clear about your values, who you are. And it's not a static thing, who you are is also something that evolves. So you know, what you would say you were three years ago might be different from what you are today. Of course, there are some fundamental things that haven't changed in your deepest essence, but you've probably matured. You may have changed, you may have expanded your understanding. Maybe you've been through some crises. Maybe you've gone for a relationship. Maybe you got married. Maybe you've had children. Maybe you've gone down with stress and got back up again. So many things can have happened that will have changed your view of yourself and the room, because there is always an ability in humans to expand in complexity. We may not always want to, because sometimes expanding ourselves in complexity can be good, sometimes a bit painful, but that's often what happens, that life affects us in a way, or we interact with life in a way that makes us evolve. And that's why I would say the relationship to guilty conscience. That as one of the things that is hugely important for you, especially when you live in an age where there's such an extreme amount of information overload, where it's possible to go out and let yourself be bombarded with different views, knowledge, snippets, advice, recommendations and just sharing ways of seeing life all the time. So you can actually be on it all the time, so it's incredibly important that you have a pretty good anchor in yourself. And we don't have that because we're a work, right? So often we don't want to have an anchor in ourselves. Um, and that's what you can feel when you're a little I need to sit properly in it. I'm the kind of person who always has to sit with my legs up. Um, so you'll notice that when you interact with Instagram, for example. And if you follow some influencers or some experts in some areas or some women who share their lives and their opinions, the way they spend time with their children and look after their home or care about their home or women are very often interested in relationships. Not all women, but many women. We want to understand the relational Elle and create love and harmony in the relational. That's also why when we look at it, it's women who take the lead in the care sector. So it's mostly women who are typically more concerned about the well-being of the children, especially the younger they are. This doesn't mean that men don't care about children's well-being, but there is a lot that makes a visible difference here. And it's also a challenge I see that often arises, for example, when I do couples counselling, not that the woman often feels she has an extreme relational and over-responsibility. It's as if she feels as if she has all her bones, she feels as if if if I don't take on this responsibility, if I don't crack the code and keep on seeking knowledge and trying to analyse whether my child is thriving, my child is thriving, we are thriving, I mean in the relational aspect, then there is often some dissatisfaction or my children didn't get through. So there can be a huge amount of worry. There can be an enormous drive in the woman to understand a lot of relational issues and to understand her own behaviour, to understand the behaviour of others. Um, but it can also, that drive can also manifest itself as a guilty conscience if she feels she is failing in relation to the goals she has set herself, or if she feels she is failing in relation to what she thinks others are doing. Because it's just like, oh my god, now someone says you can't say no to children. F***, I've been saying no all day to my child. Now I'm all wrong. Or f*** your f***. Now they can't have that. Now there must be some salads or something. That's what I've come to use. Such s***. Oh no, now there's someone's past trauma. I wonder if I have past trauma. I don't know if I do. You know, you know. So, you know, there's a lot of things in this that can give you a lot of worry and a lot of worry will typically have the side effect of making you feel guilty because you're already starting to doubt and of course we can't avoid being worried sometimes and we can't always avoid feeling guilty. But what can be really good to be aware of is this thing where you notice when you stroll on Instagram or you've read an article or whatever you're looking for input and let yourself be inspired by seeking knowledge and advice. Try to notice how you feel when you have gained this knowledge. Because there are slightly different states of mind and some of them are more beneficial than others. So when you've read a post for some of the people that you feel and you can feel afterwards that you're feeling weird, you can go in and feel like okay that post hit me and you can actually use the interaction you have with life, with other people, with the workplace, with whatever it is to find out, okay, what it is that hit me here. I can feel something arising. And it can be a feeling of less worth. It could be a feeling of, phew, I'm not doing nearly as well and I can't do nearly as well. Or it could be anything that hits. You might be annoyed, you might be frustrated, you might be angry, you might want to yell at them. A whole range of states can occur. And what can be really beneficial in terms of following these states is not to rush, but to work with the guilty conscience in a way that it doesn't get in your way. It's about figuring out, okay, what exactly is in this reflection? Why is it that this is hitting me the way it's hitting me? Sometimes you'll find that it's noise. Sometimes you'll find that you feel a bit like, phew, this is giving me feelings that I'm not doing well enough, that I'm not enough, that I don't have a cool enough house. That, you know, my relationship isn't loving enough, or that I don't know how to love my children enough. So it can be all sorts of things without you really having anything to show for it. You can just feel that that post, following that and and and and being able to see other realities, other ways of living life or other ways of expressing yourself or other ways of organising yourself or other ways of being with your children, does something to you. If it does something to you, it might be good to feel it a little deeper before it settles as a guilty conscience. Because it's this thing about sometimes you can say that you can be fascinated by, you can be incredibly fascinated by other ways of being a woman, because there are many ways of being human. There are many ways to be a woman. Within the female gender spectrum, there are many behavioural variants, just as there are within the male gender. And there are also behavioural differences between the two genders. So it's becoming more and more vast and complex. And it's more the fact that you have to do a little bit in this time we live in, where there is so much information available. But it's actually important that you look after your mind and you look after your body and you look after your psyche and your states of mind because you become how there are a lot of people who want to try to grab your attention. I want to do that too. So I also post something where I write about the guilty conscience. It's not because I want to grab your attention. I don't want to push you out of anything. I want to give a I want to offer some perspectives that if you can use them, if they're beneficial to you, if you feel that you can use them as tools in your life, then by all means go for it. But if they do the opposite, if it's just like, I don't have a problem with a guilty conscience or I don't want to deal with what you're writing about right now, then it's better to switch it off. Much better. So that's really why, because where you are in your life, you can have so many other things on your mind that you might not want to deal with right now. For example, many women feel this way when they have small children. Often what happens when you have small children is that the sex with your partner becomes very little or almost completely disappears. And there can be extreme anxiety here. Oh no, what's going on here? And we fall out over it, and he feels like I don't want him, and I don't want to touch, but all sorts of things come in, and there's a deep fear that if this doesn't work out at some point, the relationship won't last. So that's why when I write small, you know, little pieces of text about a lecture about intimacy, about women's sexual desire and things like that, I realise that the smaller the children a woman has, she can't cope with it. Of course, some can, because not everyone loses their desire, and for some it's different, but for many it's very typical to find yourself in nappies and sleepless nights and breast inflammation and a man who also wants a piece of you, or so it can feel. And to him, it feels more like he misses someone in his woman. But in the woman, it can feel like, I can't do it anymore. I have to, I have to give more. I'm going to go insane. So having to deal with how to take care of your own sexual desire and everything like that right there, she's just like, I can't, I can't take it in. I can't, I'm not at all where I need to focus on it. So there, that is, if I start writing something like, what is possible in your female body? How much pleasure is it possible to get with sexual solutions? How much, how many orgasms is it possible for you to have and how deep can you go with your partner here? For a woman who's there, these kinds of text pieces, like at a completely different lecture, will typically be really annoying because she's not there, she's not there at all. She's just like f*** you. The nine orgasms a day. I don't want my husband looking at me at all, you know. So she can't use that for anything. She can't use it for shit. That is, if she starts to squeeze it into her life, if she starts to relate to what I'm saying, because yes, it's true that there is a huge amount of pleasure in the female body. There's a huge amount, but it's not typically connected. It's not something you typically explore when you have two small children and mastitis, because that's just not where you are. You're not supposed to have that much sex drive when you have small children because biology is so smart that it actually makes it harder for you to get pregnant when you have small children and are breastfeeding because it's too hard. It's too hard to have children. Children when you're, when you have other small children, so that means when you have small children, you're actually pulling some of the energy that you want to spend on your sexuality, you're actually sacrificing that on your children. And that can cause some friction with your partner because his sexuality works differently. He doesn't have to apply his sexuality to children in the same way, because right there you really took two different biological beings where you carry the child in your body. He doesn't do that. So exactly so for her to read some of these pieces would just be, and she gets really annoyed with me. She just like can't just walk away with that, you know, all sorts of things can come up. There can be a projection that I'm the one who should I should just shut up or I'm wrong and it can't be done. It can also come up that the woman herself turns it in and I'm wrong and I should and it's absolutely awful and I'll never want to do it again. So you can look at such a piece of information at a time when the woman is not in a place where it makes sense for her to look at this with curiosity and openness, it will really just mean that she either has to push it away make me wrong or others wrong or she may turn it in and as a bad so far beyond she can't handle it and both have not really It's not true, but that's often where we stand when we feel stuck. When we're feeling stuck, it's as if it's asking us to go into that split. It tells us that either you're wrong or I'm wrong. And then it's about what we can bear the most. And for many women, it's actually the most we can bear and make ourselves wrong. Especially if you're a very empathetic person, you'll typically be right-footed and do yourself wrong. So if you do yourself wrong or turn inwards very quickly, both to Why can't I do this? Why am I not interested? Why am I not open here? I should too, why don't I want to? Or whatever it may be. Statistically speaking, there will typically also be a greater risk of feeling guilty because you've already turned inwards. And you can say, and this and that doesn't make you wrong. There's not a flaw in you. It can just be quite nice to be aware of it in your own system. So it can be quite nice to realise how you're wired. Because if you know that you're one of those people, if you know that you're a person who will very quickly look at your own part in a conflict, who would very quickly be the first to say, no, but that's okay, don't worry about it, I probably just had a bad day, or you know what, don't worry about it, I'll pay it or whatever, but we don't have to worry about it. If you are very quickly a person who is very forgiving and who often gives you and a very giving person and and and and you take great pride in, not because it's such a moral code, but because it's huge, it's so natural for you to look at your own behaviour. Knowing that sometimes you can also end up with immature behaviour and all sorts of other things. It's just that we have all aspects as human beings, right? We can get pissed off and unreasonable and it's also in us. But you typically want to know that, if that's how you're wired. If you would know that, phew, it's really not nice to be such a conflict energy, and you would go quite far to express yourself. And it might be hard to say to a person, I don't really want to be with you. Well, it would hurt your heart. Here you should be aware that the guilty conscience can creep in more, because you can feel guilty very quickly because you have such a big heart, right? Um, and it's really just that you just have to be a little extra careful here. And here again, to get back to what I was talking about at the very beginning, it's about figuring out who the hell are you? What are your core values? Because again, you can sit and know that for you, you might be a person who really enjoys having a home where you close the door and you can be yourself, you can wear whatever clothes you want, you can run around naked, you need to recharge in peace, you have your little aesthetic corners whatever that means to you and you have you have you have you have toes and cuddles and you have some music that you enjoy you you have some different habits and rituals that you may not even think about that make you safe and comfortable in life and that is if you follow someone, let's say, a woman who is more normal, who thrives on constantly moving from one to two to two with a child on her back and maybe a new man every third year, I don't know. Well, you can get there, because we as humans contain all aspects. We have a we that isn't we that it's a psyche. So you actually have access to all variants of what we can perform as human behaviour. You will contain everything that is possible to perform. Even the worst psychopath and narcissist. It's just that those things may not be very strong in you. So it's not something you do. So you're not going to come up very often. Whereas for some of them, they'll be extremely dominant. So that is, you will actually contain everything that is humanly possible in you. But there's just, it's just not all behaviours that you put into play in life at all. There will be some that are your primary ones, and then the others won't be used like some genetics that haven't been activated, so they won't be activated in you. And it also depends on who you are and your epigenetics and your upbringing and how you were raised as a child. There are so many pieces of the puzzle as to why you have some behaviours that are more your primary, that you are much more identified with. And that also means that you can be curious. So your desire for a little more freedom, a little more spontaneity, in other words, some counterpoints to the way you actually live your everyday life, can be activated by following a woman on Instagram or who lives completely differently, or perhaps a woman who has chosen not to have children and who is self-employed. You can be like that, you can be a little bit god, a little bit scared of it, and you can also be a little bit impressed. You can also be a little bit, oh how exciting. And here's the thing, there's nothing wrong with that. It's great that we actually have access to see different aspects of behaviour being played out in other women, where we can be so inspired, and we can just be like wow, you can do that too. When you manage to be more at home in yourself and have an acceptance of who you are to say, I am a person who needs, and I have chosen to live like this, and I thrive on that. So it can be very beautiful to see women unfold in a way that is very alien to the way you have chosen to live. But if you've been shaken in the way you live, or if you've suddenly woken up and realised, God, my life has been shaped in a way where I thought that's how I wanted to live it, but now I can feel that I don't actually want to change it. There can be some guilty conscience. It can be difficult. So it can be like, God, I should be more free, or I should be more entrepreneurial. I should be too, and then this guilty conscience can creep in. So that's why you could say it's a place where the guilty conscience can arise. It's in relation to the fact that right now in, I would say actually in human history, you have the opportunity to expose yourself to other types of personality traits than the ones you use most all the time. Um, because you can be online and because there's a huge exposure of people sharing their lives and their experiences. Um, and that hasn't been possible to the same extent. You had to travel the world to experience it or you know, so you weren't exposed to it as much. So the way that being overwhelmed and feeling guilty and doubting who you are can creep in is therefore a little bigger today, it's always been an option for you but it's just become a little bigger today because you can be on as much as you can be on so what you can use this for is actually to really go in and border and make peace with who you are so who wha what what what are your main values and also feel into well what is it here are my main values is it really I actually have I actually have sometimes because you will have that in eras then you will sometimes have an urge to get out and choose more freedom-seeking for example let's say you've been with small children for a long time have enjoyed your bubbles your cocoon and all that then you may well it may well be you start to feel so oh I need to get out and experience need some spontaneity I need some fun so sometimes when we've been in a behaviour, our psyche wants us to go out and test and expose another form of behaviour, so sometimes you can also see that you've suddenly become interested in following someone who makes some completely different choices than you. It may also be that you're actually seeking the opposite of some of the things you're facing, but here you use it more constructively, not as a god. I have to change my personality completely and become like them over there. So that's why you can actually use the guilty conscience when it arises as a guide to find out, because you can say in any case it's important with bad smit, it's to find out why is it there? Why has it appeared? What does it have to tell me? And in these different situations where we look at others, integrate with others and become fascinated by other ways of being a woman and a way of making choices as a woman. So you can use this as a bit of a kick in the arse to yourself if it's something you want to explore as well as you can use it to say: ‘Well, you have the right to live your life like that.’ I don't immediately agree with some of the things you say, but peace with it. You know, instead of focusing so much on that, I actually choose to live my own life because it feels more right. So there's both a gracefulness in terms of letting others be free to be like this, as well as being stronger in your own choices. So that's actually the way you counteract a guilty conscience. It's actually by stepping more into the person you are, or stepping more into the person that you want to be, that you want to live out. So it can be, and therefore it can also be a good guide, you're in a vacuum, you're in a place where you're just now figuring out who you are. It could be that you're taking on motherhood, which is also an extreme step and yes, complexity. You may be transitioning from a teenager to a young woman. You may be transitioning from a young woman to an older woman. You may be going from woman to, you know, menopause. You might actually be saying that it's no longer possible to bring children into the world. That is, all these transitions to actually entering a new phase of being a woman. You may also be in a place where you're in a crisis that feels violent. There are some family members you need to say no to. There may be a relationship you need to leave or you're at a place where you want to surrender to a relationship again. And it's difficult because of some old traumas. There can be so many things. When you're in those in-between stages where you're going from being identified with something to going to something else. Those stages you would typically be confused as hell. Because you know you're leaving something you thought you were, but you haven't landed in the new thing that's on the horizon. You can feel something changing, but you haven't landed yet. That place is kind of a scary s*** to stand in because you feel a bit like nobody. You might feel like you want to run back, but you can't. And you also want to land quickly in the new. But it takes as long as it takes. During these series of periods, I would also really recommend you to be aware of your guilty conscience, because it's really hard to have a compass. You have to feel like a bird that you know when it's too chrysalis before it unfolds. It's kind of a period where you don't really feel like you have much of a foothold before you land again. And the feeling of a foothold is a condition you feel when you become more grounded again in the new. So in a situation like this, I would really recommend being very obsessed with yourself because you can get overloaded with information and with different if you can go and look at different women to get inspired, not because we don't go out and get something like they have. But when we're inspired by other women or even tricked by it, it can show something about what we really want to explore in ourselves. Then you can use it in a way where you can see it's down for yourself and you can see it enriches you. Finally, if it overwhelms you and it pushes you down into this I can't do anything and what I have now I haven't done it either and she's doing yoga every day. I haven't touched that either. Plus she bakes buns and plus she takes the kids and I'm totally you know if it gives you that feeling it's actually better to switch off. Better switch off. So then and it's actually the same news. So the same thing if you follow the climate crisis and the war in Ukraine and rising prices and pollution. I mean, sometimes it can feel like it's a requirement, we have to keep up with a lot of things. But if you keep up with a lot of things that make you feel extremely guilty because you don't feel you can do anything to solve it. And I know that of course we have to keep up with being enlightened about, well, I have to start taking care of my plastic consumption. Because there are some things that we need to be aware of so that we can incorporate them collectively, so that we can all pull together. So of course, of course you have to do it. But what can also be in it is more the fact that when you use, for example, when you sit and follow the news about the war in Ukraine, you get completely horrified, you feel guilty that you can now go out and hug your children, and they don't, if you feel guilty because you feel your heart bleeds so much for something out of the world. Erm. And here you can say something a little rough. Hey, someone said that the signal went out. It didn't go out with me. Erm, so it could be yours that it went off. Um, but if there are others who lost it, you're very welcome to write if there are others who have experienced that it got stuck or that it went haywire. Someone said it was fine, so I think it was just you who lost it. Um, but I can see that you're back on, so we'll continue. And it's this one too, so theirs is one that you have to treat as a bit of a vulnerable coupling point. I don't know if you've all driven in a car like this, where sometimes it's hard to find, right? And it's a bit the same in terms of how much knowledge do I need to feel like I'm keeping up and taking my share of the responsibility and when do I get some knowledge that really just paralyses my system because I feel like I'm powerless. Powerless in relation to Putin and powerless in relation to seeing a way out of this. And just so you know, you have full permission to say, right now I'm actually shutting down this world news. Um, if you get so overwhelmed that you're overcome with a guilty conscience that you're better off than some other people in the world right now. Because going down and feeling like you don't have the right to feel good because crises are happening elsewhere in the world doesn't benefit you or the family you're trying to take care of, but it can affect you anyway. And there's actually a huge amount of conscious work involved in saying, well, in being extremely conscious and critical about what you're sending your mind out for, and noticing what it does to me when I take in this information and circulate this point of view, this way of being in the world or this perspective. Because you can say that if you can do something, if you have to familiarise yourself with some knowledge that is difficult, you might see it as if you have to do it because you need it for something. Several years ago, I read up on how children have been treated throughout history. A historian who has sort of smeared it. Um, completely disgusting. It was simply that I almost threw up several times. It was one of the hardest things I've ever chewed my way through. Well, he's such a bone dry historian, so it's not like he's exaggerated in any way. He writes in a very, very professional dry way. But the way we've treated children from the Viking Age onwards, he's kind of taken from the first time we could start finding texts or stone tablets or religious texts, where he could get an understanding of how children have been met, because it's true, not much has been written about children, so there has clearly been such an indirect way. That's kind of why he's tried to pick himself up completely. Up here to the 20th century. Um, you could say the reason I put myself through it is because I've been hugely interested. I'm hugely s how have we been created, how have we been created by our evolution to also understand how how robust we are and what some of the things that emerge are not always necessarily related to what has just been led this little life has a long history so therefore to be able to do my work well enough and to be able to share knowledge and to be able to understand connection about and and and lack of connection it's lack of connection, so I had to understand as much human history as I could. So therefore it had a purpose. There was a purpose for me to get into it because I want to be able to understand it so I can better help those people. And I have a more nuanced understanding when I go out and speak. Because actually having that whole understanding when I help a mum who feels like shit, who has a guilty conscience about yelling at her child or about holding her child in a state of powerlessness, which is not a coincidence that happens once in a while. When she's standing there it can simply hit her with such a crazy guilty conscience that she can hardly get up again. And it's not that it should be ignored, because we don't want to end up with our children. And we know our children have a good second. We don't want that. But we come from a past where we killed children. We slaughtered them, we beat them with sticks. So children are not really considered bad children. That is, neglected and abused children right up until the 1900s, you could actually say that they were all children. It was simply the way children were viewed. And it's absolutely horrifying to say that we've survived that as a species, and it's been extremely brutal, extremely violent. And being able to see it, the greater light, means that it has one of those little curves on the thread. When we know how to repair, how to begin to deal with our anger, we begin to reunite with the child on the other side and take responsibility for it, then the child can easily cope with the fact that we don't always keep a straight line, because it's inhumane. We can't. We have a nervous system, we have kitten responses. We're not. We get pushed. Things up. So it's something to do with him being more self-centred. And I would say sensitivity has a lot to do with how you approach guilt. Because a guilty conscience, once it hits you, unfortunately you tend to feed yourself with things that make you feel more guilty. It's as if it's being circled, you're being pulled down into a big black hole. And that's also why, if you have some things that you fall into that make you feel extremely guilty, there are two ways. One is if there's something you can see that you fall into again and again and again, and it makes you feel sick to your stomach and guilty. Then it's okay, is there something here that you need to take care of? Is there something here that you need to negotiate? Does the guilty conscience tell you that you need to take care of it? And it can be, for example, if you have some meetings, for example, that you feel extremely guilty that it always goes wrong when they come in the afternoon, they always hope that they don't freak out in the afternoon. It always goes wrong. Or they hope that it's always nice to come. Erm, they feel guilty that when they have to visit their extended family or their own parents that they can't manage to be there. And they don't want to be there and they feel bad, so we they get confused and there can be all sorts of things that creep in. And sometimes it's actually about saying that guilty conscience, well, hey, what's this really about? Well, it's about the fact that if I say no, it could be visiting my own parents or grandparents, for example. If I say no, they'll see it as something I can't allow myself to do. Then I will, then they will make me feel guilty. So that's why I participate even though I don't want to, even though we don't have a good relationship, and even though I find them uncomfortable, I participate anyway. And then, but then it's my own guilty conscience that I think children should be allowed to participate, or my own body should be exposed to it, or I can't speak up. So you see, we can't, sometimes we try to avoid guilt by doing something together with others because we know that they will have a hard time with us setting boundaries. They will have a hard time when we say no or we step out of the relationship or whatever we do. We can feel that it's not accepted. It's not received well. And that's when we're afraid of the guilty conscience at the forefront. We're afraid of the guilty conscience we might feel when those people sort of shrug us off or say, we can't be responsible for that or we've used a social norm, how can we do that? So it's about making choices that sometimes intersect with other people's expectations and hopes for you. And that's why many people, in order to avoid the guilt and shame that can come for others and the guilty conscience that it can create, we adjust more, and then we go to things. We allow ourselves to overstep our boundaries to a greater or lesser extent to try to prevent bad behaviour. The problem is that the bad behaviour creeps into our lives, because then we feel bad, we feel guilty that we feel this way, we feel guilty that we don't want to be with these people that we might actually like, you can easily like some people while you can't really put up with their behaviour because people each have something to offer, so people can be lovely, but if they get caught up in their defences, their behaviour can become extremely annoying, and not many people have grown out of that either. And speaking of how far back in time, how children have been treated, my parents' generation, erm, say in the early 70s, right? And the generations behind them, well, they were extremely socialised. So the thing about having your own needs and allowing yourself to have your own needs, allowing yourself to say: ‘Well, okay, it's a social norm to meet like this, but I don't really want to do it like this or: ‘Well, then you have a wedding like that.’ No, but I really just want to go down and get whitewashed where there's no-one around. I do that for me for me. It has nothing to do with you, but they can take it as a personal criticism because you're breaking a social norm, a social way of being together, even though you're not doing it to piss anyone off. You're really just doing something that you feel inside that you want to do. And you'll recognise this, no matter how big or small it is, you'll recognise that you're standing in this place where you feel so squashed. You say, if I really say my honest opinion here, or really speak up, even though I come from a place in me where it's really something to do with you. It's something to do for myself. So what guilty conscience please? Can I allow myself to do that? And here it's also important to know, because this is about the social, where we talk about guilty conscience before, which can creep in, because we need to know who we are, and we can mirror ourselves in various other types of behaviours that we haven't cultivated ourselves, or we haven't been interested in living out, so it can be that guilt tells us, I need to be a little more wild, or I want to be a little more. So then you can take care of it. Or the bad conscience is really just noise like no, I stand by myself, and I actually like it like this, but how amazing that you're like this. So this kind of guilty conscience is actually about social control, social pressure. So it's actually something more that's imposed on you, where you could say the other kind of guilty conscience comes more from within. It comes more from within, sometimes as a way of telling you that you don't know who the hell you are right now, so now you feel guilty every time you see something you don't do because you think you should be and it's part of the maturity journey of figuring out who you are or also the fact that you're actually landing in and having a greater acceptance of who you are I would say it's much easier diversity in others becomes much more beautiful and inspiring and subtle and just like no way you can be like that So when you're more rooted in yourself, the more rooted you are in yourself, a completely different form of behaviour will not be as such tricker. You might think shut up, I could never live that life. I would go completely insane. I'd be tired to the bone. Mega stressed. But you know it can be exciting for you to witness that someone can live differently. It's no longer threatening to you because you know who you are. You know who you are to a greater extent. I don't think they realise with the whole learning about yourself thing. It's kind of something that keeps unfolding. But this other one in relation to social settings, it's a completely different kind of guilty conscience. Um, and it has its own very piquant flavour, um, when you become a mother. Erm, I think those of you who are with me, you know it, or you've heard of it, if you haven't experienced it personally. And it's the one where you're standing there completely raw and in charge of this little child, and you're completely fucked up, because you don't know, you're both happy and completely fucked up, because you're responsible for this little existence, and you're like, what the hell do I do? I haven't tried it before. Of course, it's in our instincts, but it's also extremely overwhelming to get to know this child and get to know this child's signals and stuff. So there's a need in you when you become a mum. There's a need in you to bring some power home. So it's actually a journey home to yourself and find out who you are as a woman and as a mum. And you actually want that. So people should just back the f*** off while you figure this out. So there's something almost as if many women come into contact with that anger when they become parents. I've heard so many women say that, but I had no idea I had anger in me, so when I became a mum, I just became such a raging fury, there's something there's some power that arises, it's something about the power you shouldn't get too damn close to my kids here. And then there's something about that, but at the same time there's an enormous vulnerability, there's an enormous uh very very very fine uh desire to be able to lean on an older generation of women who can show the way. But what we really want is to be shown the way in a non-intrusive way. So what we really want is to be allowed to stand there in our power, find our way and then all of a sudden we get a little lost because we're so f***ing overwhelmed now I need someone to crawl into just for a moment and there's someone who just when we're about to clash and collapse just catches us you know like hey we're responsible for you we'll hold you we'll hold you for a bit you'll find your way and then the moment we get up and stand who is then willing to let us go again. That kind of love is actually what we hunger for, but what we feel we experience is that we have meetings with our in-laws and stuff like that, who have not received this support either. They were in the same place, but they didn't get it either, because it's not a longing, it's not a maturity in being a woman that we've developed yet. We simply haven't unpacked it yet. That's what we're working towards unpacking here. And that actually means that what you often experience is that you think your mother and your mother-in-law are too transgressive, that they make you feel abandoned when you need them, and when you need to stand up for yourself and make your own choices, they criticise you. And your mother-in-law and your mother are just as much on overtime, because they really want to be there and try to help, but they also mess around with it themselves, because they haven't experienced this beautiful dance with hey, now I support you, give you advice, now you need to find your own way, and I have full respect for that, and I can easily handle you making choices that I didn't make, because what happens in them is, there's the same cycle. If you make choices that are no different than the choices they made when they had children, then they can feel poor. Then they can feel poor again. smoke that if you do something other than what I did one of us must be wrong so either it's you or it's me and I can't handle the guilt and the guilt of it so therefore I have to make you wrong and it has to be so subtle so it's very much in our defence so it's not so much about who you are as a woman and who your mother-in-law is and who your mother is as beautiful beings who have to be here and have the right to be here it's more about what we've been conditioned to do, what we've been what we've been what we've been exposed to so it's these defences they have set up and so it's another form of guilty conscience. So it's a completely different form of social control, which has been handed down from culture to culture somewhat uncritically. And we can say, of course, our little gem of a country in the world right now, where we are incarnated, as we speak, Denmark, there is much less social control than if you were born in a country where there is forced marriage and forced clothing and whatever the hell, where the woman doesn't really have any place or any rights, unless it's some man or father who dictates it. So you can still find that on the planet today. You can still find that variant. It's still here. The country we live in, we've outgrown that. I mean, we've evolved away from it. But you will still, there will still be some places that tear and rip at you. There will be some places where you might long to go out and define your own path. Whether it's that you keep your own wheel, or it's that you don't celebrate Christmas, or it's that you are a mum in a different way than your own mother was. Or it's that you live differently in relationships. You're not married, or you have a partner, you might have two different partners, you might have several men for your children, and you find a way to make it work, or you choose to have children. So there can be so many of those things. Every time you do something that doesn't seem to be the established norm, there can be trouble, and that trouble can make you feel guilty. It can manifest itself as a desire to lash out. They don't get to tell me what to fucking do. As well as they can settle as a doubtful guilty conscience, oh god, am I doing something wrong, and am I too much, and am I too selfish, and should I, and all sorts of things can be done. So that guilty conscience as social pressure. And of course, if you ask your mother, your mother-in-law and mother and your own family, they would never, unless you're in the place where there's widespread narcissism, widespread psychopathy and stuff like that, they won't understand that they're exposing themselves to social pressure, because a lot of this stuff is below the surface of consciousness. So you can see it more as a class perhaps of values, it's a class of generation gap, but you're also helping to create new ways, new ways of living. Not because everyone has to live the way you necessarily have to, but there is a new variant. That is to say, you actually have you actually have in this time where we have the media and we have more openness. At least we have more of a collective desire for more openness. We want to be more respectful of our differences, that we find it difficult to do so when it comes down to it. Just as we feel believed in our own point of view, it's difficult. But we do have a mental desire to do so. We actually wish that we could meet each other at eye level, so we're working on it. So you could say it's new that we're in a place, where we can openly discuss it in the public debate, like of course there should be gender equality and of course women shouldn't be victimised and of course fathers should also have the right to maternity leave and of course you're allowed to have the sexual orientation you have without being subjected to violence like that, so if for you and me it's it's just common sense, it's just like that, so of course of course you should have of course you should have some views, but it's new it's new that you can openly discuss things in that way and in some countries you can't at all there it's completely closed, but we've taken a step in relation to the fact that we've realised that. Of course there should be room for all these forms of diversity, but how do we put it into practice when it hits something in ourselves, uncertainty, doubt, expectations? There are often a lot of expectations about what love is, for example in your parents' generation. Perhaps your mum might see it as if you cancel Christmas or cancel some party or some event that you know means a lot to her. It means a lot to her that people come and are there regardless of whether they've talked or whatever. But it's very much that here it can hurt her. It may well be that she feels down in her system that you don't love her. It's probably not just what she feels. Often the root cause is much deeper than the surface feelings. So that means when you get tricked, for example, if your mum gets tricked here, like how other things can trick you, it will be such a, it will be a disappointment. That is, when we're tricked, there will be something like, you're wrong, you're doing something to me. It's typically the superficial surface feeling or phew, I can't live up to what you're asking me to do or I'm not good enough. You could say it's actually kind of the same surface feelings. They're just at opposite ends of the scale. Either something is wrong with you or something is wrong with you or something is wrong with me. And that's actually the art here. And that's kind of why the saying that the only thing we can really do for each other is to take care of our own s***. Well, there's truth in that. Of course, it's a truth with modifications, but there's truth in it because every time you feel that feeling of frustration in meditation. You're doing something to me. Phew, I have to change myself to be something else or whatever it might be. When you dare to be with those feelings and breathe into them and let it go deeper. Because what happens here is that the surface state transforms. If you only stay in the frustration and just like if your mum only stays in the frustration that she takes it personally that you don't come home for Christmas because you want to have a tiny little Christmas with your husband and your kids or whatever it might be. Just a little example. It's just a classic example. And that she might get cold. She might say it's okay, but you can tell it's not okay at all and she doesn't say the reason why. Um or she uh she might stand you out or blame you or come along or go into sacrifice then she may then she can be alone or whatever the hell is there can be anything but it's surface feelings because you can say if she took care of it and she can feel she is being tricked a bit like you can take care of things when you get tricked by seeing another woman get a perspective that you either disagree with or that does something to you it's actually so you sit and breathe just like okay f*** it hit me hard that phew that's before it settles as a guilty conscience, because it would do that at some point. There will be a guilty conscience in relation to the situation with your mum where you cancel Christmas, you will feel guilty about doing it and at the same time you will feel relieved. She will typically also feel guilty after she has touched you or been angry and lost her temper or whatever she has reacted to it, she will typically also feel guilty, but won't know how to come back from it. She'll feel guilty that she didn't get to meet you, or she'll feel guilty that they don't have contact and it hurts her. And she doesn't know how to deal with it, she hasn't learnt what to do about it. She hasn't learnt how the hell to come back from this. But you could say the ideal situation where such a situation arises, let's say I have my son, he'll be 11 here on 3 August. Let's say that when he's, I don't know, 18, he says: ‘Well, Mum, I'm spending Christmas alone. I do have a problem with Christmas. I can feel that it doesn't really do anything for me. I actually feel like sitting in a resort and diving with some guys on Christmas Eve. I'm not a traditional Christmas person, but Christmas does something for me. And for me, it's like this example of talking to your mum and I've felt like I had to break out of a structure to create my own wheel. So there was something that was a bit of a showdown to kind of stand on my own two feet. So the wheel became the focal point of it. So I could well be at risk of my son not wanting to live in my new one. Now I've created a tradition where we have our little press together where we feel enormously connected. Yes, we do. So don't be surprised if he comes and says mum that wheel there, I'd really rather go diving or something, you know, and you know in a situation like that I'll get hit. And that's where if I can take care of it, that is, instead of letting it go cold, you know, don't answer him and just think he's selfish and it's also poor me or whatever the hell I end up in, it's really about breathing and saying okay, so how the hell do we handle these situations and it's really about breathing and saying okay I'm hit what's happening and then allow these then there can be reri f****** he wouldn't fucking allow if he knew what I've done for his sake allow it all to come up allow it but don't hate on any of it it's just the surface it's residue it's just on the surface um and you have to ugly or ugly in relation to what's actually underneath is way down here. So if you breathe through these states and allow them to be there, because sometimes you want to say, no, I mustn't think anything, my son, and there you are, but when states come up in the cycle, then all sorts of things can come up. Furious. I feel, you know, too hard. I feel like anything can come up. So it can be very dramatic. But the trick is really not to both allow it, while not becoming so identified with it, that those states will also transform you. So you actually have to breathe through these dramatic little drama queen states that pop up, that will pop up when you're the trick. And when you allow it to pop up and breathe, you're breathing through the contractions kind of seen by it, because normally you'll try to fight it and push it away, but the trick is to breathe in and that is, when you breathe in them, then emotions transform. And then you can see how deep you can go. Then, over time, you may start to realise that I wouldn't care if he only knew. So that's the martyr, right? And then some poor me can go like that. Then I have to sit here all alone, I'll be up in a minute. And then it can go further down into a deep, deep sleep. It can be such a deep, deep sorrow the desire to feel deeply connected to more people. And you've hooked up with maybe your son and what the hell do I know. And the deeper you allow yourself to go, you also go deeper into existence. And here I'll get the solution. If I suddenly land in you have a deep understanding of why this triggers you so much and you can also get an understanding of what you do about it. Because it's when you're not wired by emotional state that you also prevent a guilty conscience by either having scars healed or having something put over them. on those who have now reported to you and whatever it may be not that is to say because the bad feeling comes over the one where you take someone like that you take your dan it j but I pretend like nothing and say it's fine where you are really weird when you are with the person or you get furious throw it at the person and you think it's maybe just hardcore enough you know if you choose one of these surface states, then it all ends up a bit in shots and you end up feeling a little guilty because you can feel there is something in the relationship that is off and you don't really know and you can't really know if I have taken enough responsibility or if it is the other person or whatever the hell is up and down in this not now daring to follow it deeper and deeper down. Look, it may be that you're like, okay phew, it may be that you come down to the main worry. The main worry is that yes, you had dreamed of having a really cosy Christmas. Walking arm in arm and laughing and whatever else. There can be all sorts of things like that that I can now have about how Christmas should be or how being with my son should be or something like that, right? As I think it's just going to continue the older he gets. But it's like that when I realise, okay, that was the illusion he broke by doing something else. That is, the image I had of how it should be broken. So it's actually, I have to, it's actually, the pain is actually about me having to surrender to things turning out differently than I had hoped they would. And when you get hold of it and can breathe through it, it is also released. And that's when the grief is released and you actually start to be at peace. Be at peace with it, and then your mind automatically begins to form a picture of what Christmas should be like. Then all of a sudden, God, I've often thought that Christmas could be really cool and maybe go to France and sit down in a little place like that. And go for some walks. You might start to have some other visions of what it might be like when that happens, because you can see we can actually go to scifi films that I love, they can take that thing where you have a reality that completely crumbles and then it's shattered into something else it's possible in human form it's possible that we have we imagined something that crashes together and then we create something new but that when things crash together well feel it's not very comfortable and when we are in the dead water before something new has been created can also be where we need either we think we are wrong or someone else is wrong but when And we allow this, and we stand in a place where it's like we're using the energy of what's burning together to form a new image. Well, you could do it like this. There's your response, then there's my response scenario with my 18-year-old son who wants to dive down and dive lightly, and he doesn't want to bother me. Then I could go, then I could meet him by saying, well okay honey, that sounds really cool when I, because then I'm in that state. It's also possible that I'd say, ‘Oh, shit, it just hit me. I had all sorts of visions of how you and I were going to enjoy ourselves this Christmas, but I'll take care of that. That's not what's bothering me. And that sounds bloody marvellous. And then I can say And then I can also say at the same time to make sure that I don't make him feel guilty. Because I want to know that if he does something like that, he'll still have a thought that now my mum is alone, he'll have a guilty conscience about whether my decision to leave will affect where she is now. So the most loving thing we can do here is actually when we take responsibility for our own share, it is actually to set another person free from a guilty conscience. So that is, we can both put bad conscience and games that we can actually set others free from bad conscience to say by taking care of it ourselves. So that is to say, when the builder suddenly gets a different picture of a picture of another way I can celebrate Christmas as a nerve and thinks like no wow God I've actually thought about doing that too god there is actually a freedom in the fact that I don't have to stand and be hold this if my son doesn't come home then maybe I can do something else maybe my husband and I can also go out maybe we can do something we can try to endure it in a completely different way not and if I can answer for that energy well but you know what and if my son asks what about you mum do you have to be home alone and what then bu you know if I can come no I know I should find out so I just thought it would be fucking nice to spend Christmas with you but I can see that you are not there, it actually gives me the freedom to do something else. See, that's me making sure he doesn't get caught. But I'm not trying to make him feel guilty. I'm not trying to prevent him from feeling bad like we do by lying about my own condition. We try to cover up the fact that I'm miserable. I'm just like, well, I'm fine. You don't have to worry about crying all night on Christmas Eve, do you? Well, it's actually about me taking sincere responsibility for it. I get the country to say okay it's not his responsibility so I shouldn't go into a martyrdom and sit and cry about it. And this is what it means when we take responsibility for our conditions - it's in the literal sense of the word. It's taking full responsibility. It's the most difficult, actually the most rewarding, but it's the hardest work. And that's also why sometimes they rage if you really feel like you're trying to take huge responsibility for your own choices, for your own behaviour and you really take virtue and honour in it. You can sometimes get really angry at other people if they have no problem trying to stuff a guilty conscience into it, because then they can be free from taking responsibility. So there are a lot of people who are looking out for their parents or looking out for their parents, helping their parents and their partner in a way that really does because they really want to take responsibility, but you're going to play into it because you can't bear the guilt that they're trying to push into you because they're thinking like, why you used to help me with this, why don't you do it any more? And if you're open to taking on a guilty conscience, then the loop goes on. So that's a whole other way of looking at guilty conscience. So the first one is that it can come from within, because you have to find out who you are. The second is that it can come from outside, it can be pressurised on you. Social pressure that is unconscious. And this one is that you can both be the recipient of a guilty conscience being pushed into you, as well as you can push a guilty conscience into others when you don't take care of your own emotional state. And here we hit a bit of a paradox in the sense that you can't demand it all. This describes how you can land states in yourself so that you can truly set yourself free. You get to form a new one. Anyway, okay. And that crashed. F***, that was hard. It hurt and I was going through all kinds of emotions. But now it's landed. Now I can actually see another way. I can see another way. Now I feel free in it. You can't force people to do if you manage to do it. And I would recommend you practice that. I would actually say it's the way to feel free in life. It can give you extreme freedom, and it can actually give you what they say in that annoyingly clichéd language in the workplace, that you need to be adaptable. Which basically says they just want to exploit you. But this, when you become adaptable in your own life, bringing it home, it means you're able to marry mode when it's needed. And because life is fickle. And I would actually say right now life seems to be insanely changeable. So, it's actually a hugely important skill to practice. Well, yes. And even when you become, well, I've been practising that for many years. And it's not like you get hit less when you get hit. I still get hit when something crashes. So it doesn't go away. It doesn't go away sometimes the pit goes and you want to single someone out and you want to make yourself a marathoner you take sacrifices. It's also pity and all that stuff is still there. It never goes away, but it's just like it doesn't last very long. And it's more like, oh my God, how true. I was just totally victimised, I had become very attached to that person, to having to be something specific to me in a certain way, because I'm completely cracking down on you when that person doesn't want to play with you anymore, or whatever it may be. So you just get better at witnessing yourself in these states, and then you get faster at landing them. So that's the only difference. So we, I wish I could sit here and tell you that you can get to a place where you never ever feel like a victim or a martyr or that you're never ever going to sit and bitch about other people or shit. I haven't met anyone and I'm not there myself, I don't really think it works like that, so I think it's more about making peace with the fact that we sometimes end up in those places and then knowing what to do about it, and in this specific context it's about how you can prevent and land and stagnate in a guilty conscience as well as it's about how you avoid getting a guilty conscience stuffed into others and also how to reject other people's guilty conscience at the door and it's a bit different because I would say personally I think it has been easier. Personally, I think it's been easier to work with working with landing my own. Well, it hasn't been easy. It's taken me freaking many years to get to where I am today, and I'm by no means there yet. But I still think it's been easier to be introspective and look at, okay, what can I work on, can I land this feeling? Maybe I also have a professional interest in it. That's what I geek out about. It's all about emotions and how you land, what you get caught up in and overwhelmed by, and how you come back to the physio union. That's what everything I do is almost all about. So, of course, I'm also a bit of a driving force there, because it fascinates me and I'm enormously fascinated and inspired and find it very mysterious and want to understand it in full detail. So that's how I'm wired, I'm just wired that way. But I also think it's been easier. It's actually one of the things that's harder is actually rejecting other people's bad things they try to push into me. It's been a harder journey to learn to identify when that happens. Because it's like when others are trying to and the vast majority of people do it unconsciously. So some people are consciously manipulative, but it's not, it's not a lot of this happens unconsciously. So if your mum does it, or your family, the people you hoped that love you all the time and stuff like that come to it, it's often unconscious. It doesn't excuse the behaviour. Well, it doesn't excuse it, but sometimes you can be afraid that people are being deliberately manipulative. In my experience, I would say that much of this is quite unconscious from many people's perspective. They're in a projection, so they don't realise when they're doing it. And they haven't learnt to feel their own state to death. So they get stuck in these surface feelings that it's someone else's fault. Either you're wrong or I'm wrong. So they don't get any further to the dualism, because you have to get deeper into the root cause for things to land. You can't land the dualism. You have to be with the one that gets further down. You can only straighten out the dualism or straighten inwards. That's the only function of lying in dualism. So you can't - you can talk to someone about how this works, but you can't take the journey for them. You can't teach a person to go beyond dualism and land a state unless they have the drive to learn it. You can't force-feed it to them. It's simply impossible, believe me, I think I've tried every avenue. I have to say, it's not a winner, it's not a winner. I mean, it's not going to do a damn thing. Erm, so you could get quite frustrated. So I would actually say that the best thing you can do is to let go of the hope that people will change. There's a pain in that. You can also feel it deep down. There can be frustration, anger, and you can't see that you haven't been a role model for me when you can't figure it out yourself. There can be all sorts of surface birth emotions. that. And when you start diving deep into it, there's a deep pain that it's not possible to connect as deeply as you want. There are all kinds of things down here, but it can also be read. You can actually let it go, because it can also fill you up in a way where you actually end up pushing guilt into other people. You should be able to handle this like this. You can't. Um. So that's actually an important learning, and it's hard. It's hard sometimes to look at someone who is messing around in some behaviours where you say, okay, I'm messing around too, but not there anymore. I don't mess around there anymore. I've landed some things there, but I can't do anything about you. Mess around because you can't, I can't, you there has to come an inner drive for the person themselves. So therefore you're going to be subject to some projections for people that they're going to make you a scapegoat or a scapegoat and say it's your fault, when you know it's not your fault. You know, well, I'm not responsible for your dinner party turning out the way you intended it to. I'm not responsible for stepping in if I can't or don't feel like it. Well, it's not my responsibility, you know. Um, but if the person is trapped in the fact that it's a disappointment, then the person can't really, it's the coloured lens the person can't see anything else. And then the person will come to you in various indirect or direct ways and say, it's your fault that I feel this way. The choice you made or what you didn't do has made me feel this way, so it's your fault. And it's actually the blame that can settle in you as a guilty conscience. And that's what's harder. I think it's a hell of a lot easier to work through your own, I think. Not everyone feels that way. You typically have a preference. For some it would be easier to say, that's not mine. If you feel that way, it can be a little harder to start looking at your own share a little more. So I would say that the better you are at setting boundaries with others, then the exercise is to find out how your own emotional register works. And if you're very overwhelmed and have a lot of energy on your own part to understand your own behaviour, it can sometimes be harder to set boundaries. And the reason for that is that the more you work inside your own emotional inner universe, you actually increase your emotional sensitivity. And you're using these muscles a lot. You become more nuanced in it. You become more, you actually become a more and more sensitive person, which can sometimes feel like you're just as, well, you're like a, you know, you're like a dental neck that's exposed. So you can feel so sensitive that it's actually uncomfortable. And sometimes it's a bit about who you're with. Because if you're very sensitive with someone who isn't very sensitive and hasn't done the work and lives a little more black and white, you can often feel what's going on in others. It's not the same Enel, so you know exactly what their emotional state is. But the more well versed you are in sensing things and taking care of your own, the more you'll be able to sense if you're with people who don't care at all about what's cycling around in their system. So it can get very muddy, and it can be difficult to know what's mine and what's yours here, what's my responsibility and what's not my responsibility. Um, and it's just something you just need to know that that's the way it is, and there's nothing wrong with that. And it's not that you're not more right than the people who don't take care of their stuff. It's just that way for you. In the way that you're on your development journey, there's nothing right that's wrong with it. But what is in it is that it's harder the more you start to deal with your own behaviour, you know, being like, okay, that and understanding your own contribution to conflict and disharmony and everything else, and you really start to pick up more and more things yourself and say, no, but I don't want to do that. With all due respect to that form, I don't really want to participate in that. And I don't have an expectation to participate if you don't want to participate in my form. So, there's a greater respect for people's freedom, the worse it will be for you to be with people who don't do that because they're going to push their vision into you because they're still only in dualism. They haven't got to the point where you're saying, either there's something wrong with you or there's something wrong with me. So it's either they'll call and say, oh, you affect me so much when you say no, I have so many doubts. I want to hang myself. Some people have parents who are like that or other families where they, you know, where they fall into the victim role, which then also makes you feel guilty. God, I have to be there to take care of you. Or else it goes against Poland, which is your cloud. guilt and how selfish you are and you and we won't bother another time and you know but it's two sides of the same coin and it's really not so much about who your who the person is but it's something about the person not having managed or not having not learnt to get further than under dualism so again either I'm wrong or you're wrong that's where they constantly end up not so then you can have a meta perspective that all people are where they are and we shouldn't mess with that and there's no hierarchy in that way and that's true as well as it's true that there are some people, whose behaviour you don't want to be with the more you move, because they will keep trying to pull you in, because they don't understand where you're coming from, because you no longer play by their rules. It's two different radio channels. So you'll also experience that sometimes when you've taken some jumps. I say you've been in a crisis and you've been down with some of that, you've really worked on yourself and have landed some things, found out more deeply who you are and what you want and what you don't want, and have practised saying respectfully on and off to say like: ‘Wow, thank you for that invitation. That sounds really nice. I can feel it, I just have to do something else now, you know, so it's not a personal judgement you have like you can do it over there but I just have to do something else here will you meet here will you feel you're being put down because in their when they're in in in in in in in in that it's your fault or my fault but then there's really only that thing about me taking bad conscience on me because I take guilt on me and then the guilt comes as an offshoot or I put the guilt on you with the expectation that the guilt will make you make amends so you can really say that we'll talk more about this when it arises then it's relationships more than commodities It it it's the lower octaves of love. It's not really anything to do with love. If any of you are so spiritually orientated, it's really about operating primarily on the lower chakras and you haven't really got your heart connected yet. Because the lower chakras are very much about survival. So you could say that many social norms are very survival-orientated. It's a bit like, well, you have to be part of a social group. It means, well, when you give a gift, you will get one. It's a bit of a trade-off. You contribute with some of it, a relationship investment, so you keep some friends who might think they're a bit of a pain in the arse. They're good to have with you when you're having a party, they're the filler, they're everything like that and we all have all of this we all have all of this sometimes we get to use relationships like that and allow ourselves to be used like that so there's no fooling around that's how we've survived as a species by being included you can see it in tribal societies also have a lot of this with you have to fit into a social because then we die as a species so that you have to know what you can and can't do so that's also part of being human because we you know consciousness in a mammalian body a mammalian body so it's more to say that we are in a place where it's possible to and start to raise the frequency of it and actually be together in a way, where we're not herding each other so much that we actually have the opportunity to say, like if my son chooses to say, well that's great that you created the wheel that you wanted. Um, you know, in the way that you wanted to, but I want something completely different, you know, I have to have the maturity to set him free to go his own way. And I take care of the effects that come from that. So it's more, and it's another version of the guilty conscience in the sense that you can feel that you want to feel that you want to. You will simply find that someone will push a guilty conscience into you with the desire to make you do the right thing. And it's not because they are bad people. If you have families who are narcissists or psychopaths, the narcissist is not necessarily aware that the person is doing it, but is unable to see beyond their own behaviour. So the narcissist will use it as a tool. But now I'm talking about ordinary people who have where we all have a little bit of snot every now and then, but where it's not all the time that they're in those very controlling dominant modes, right? Sometimes they will interpret a situation as if this is your fault, and therefore the guilty conscience will make you make sure that you don't do that again. And here you just have to realise that you have to step in and take a stand, even if it's incredibly uncomfortable. And that's also why you often don't speak up about things because you don't actually want to. You don't want to feel the guilt and the bad sweat that it triggers in you. Sometimes you will have to do it anyway to stand within who you are. Especially if you're still figuring out who you are. Then you might have to say guys, this is what I've been a part of, but now I'm going to do something else and then some rebellion might come out of it. And here again, it's actually in the same way as finding out if you're triggered by something on Instagram or something else, someone you follow, where you can examine okay, this guilty conscience I feel in relation to phew, someone wrote something about children who are too much institutionalised and stuff like that that can hit them a little hard and stuff like that. So if you feel, if it triggers something in you, because you're in a situation where you're affected because you actually have someone you can feel you want. You can feel that you live a life where you have to force your child to go to daycare and be there for many hours to keep things running smoothly. It may well be that the post isn't actually like, f***, I have to do something about it. I can't bear it. I simply can't bear the way we live. I can't bear my child having to go somewhere where he hates it. I have to f****** change it. I can't see a way out. You could say that a guilty conscience is actually about something that has been bothering you for some time. There's something you want to change. Whether it's changing nursery schools or going back to work, I don't know. It doesn't have to be something like bringing the child home, but you can feel that there's something here. Other times, it may be that you're actually thriving, your child is thriving, and you're getting your child looked after, and you may have stayed at home with your child, but then you've taken your child to a daycare centre because you're just like, phew, I need to have some time for my business or do something else and stuff like that. It makes you a better mum, whatever it may be. It may well be that you've actually landed in a form where you can see overall, look, we're all thriving now. But that this post is written in a way where it sounds like if the child is looked after, then it's a culture of separation. Erm, it can sometimes be described a bit bluntly. Um, and you can say that if it hits you, you have to, because you can't go poking around in how people write. People can also write in an emotional state, they have no opinions. That's fine. You're allowed to have that. But if it hits you, then again, you have to go in and think, okay, what, when it hits me here, what is it? Is it because there's something I need to go in and change, or is it just like, no, we're all thriving. OK, OK, OK. Yes, taking your children out of the institution completely is an option. That's not the choice we've made, and I've made peace with it. Because then what you can see is that the same post or the same exposure of something you've read should give two different outcomes. It gives an outcome that you actually get motivated to act on something that has been going on for a while. Or it can motivate you to say thanks, but no thanks. All respect for your choices. What we've chosen here, I'm going to go back and revisit. And no, it still feels like the right one. So it's that thing again about, what is the guilty conscience? I mean, what's the message in it. Because the more you start taking responsibility for labelling, and the reason why you want to get rid of it so badly is because it's fucking uncomfortable. Fucking uncomfortable that you feel bad as ass uncomfortable. So that's why you want a quick fix. Can't we just make it go away? In my experience, the more we dare to go into the lion's den and feel it and find out, i.e. learn the nuances and recognise it, then you start to feel better. Erm, is it something I need to take care of? Is it some noise that I should just say thank you with? No, thank you. Erm, is it because I'm finding myself and so I'm a bit tricked by other variants where I can use it as inspiration or maybe I should just switch off completely until I've got my footing. Is it because I'm trembling and need to speak up in my relationship or just need to show who I am? Don't even bother to speak up. It could just be that you're showing a little more of who you are in your close relationships. And it may not have been safe to do that when you were a child. So the more you unfold, you actually start to show it in speech between who you are. You can feel it creating some cures on the wire. Or it makes your parents or others feel a bit f*** if you're like that and I'm like this, who's who's who is so wrong? You can see they're affected in the same way that you were affected before. And that it can either make you feel bad up front, so it's hard for you to do it and show more of yourself or that you're actually worried about the guilt that the people around you might actually try to stuff into you. And I think it's the latter of the people around you that are going to make you feel guilty. There are actually two steps. You have both had to gather the courage to show more of yourself to actually say something or express an attitude that is different or whatever it may be. Knowing that it might backfire. When those rebels actually materialise. Sometimes they say a rebellion is sure to happen. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it's an old thing where you've been conditioned to believe that if you show yourself you'll be killed. Which isn't really about these people but about some other things that need to be healed. So your instincts still work. They're just over-interpreting the specific situation. Or your souls say: ‘Phew, if I show this side, there are rebounds.’ And yes, there are also rebellions. In the sense that you have to talk about the big drama, how could you and everything like that, there is actually an extra step you would have to have the courage and strength to handle, which is actually the thing about standing in the headwind and standing firm and saying I hear what you say, it's not my responsibility or it's not my responsibility to me your feelings and I say that in all respect. Which in turn can cause a huge backlash because when you're standing there when we're somewhere, whether it's you where someone else is trying to put guilt and shame into you because you can feel guilty or you're going to put guilt and shame into someone else to create badness When they refuse to take it on and just say, no, well, I hear what you say, but I don't feel guilty about it. I mean, I think I have the right to say this and you have the right to do that. You know, they're two different things, and I stand by that. So, they can, they can create further pain. Well, it can create deep frustration in the person if the person has been used to and not, excuse me, I'm a bit snotty, right? Not in terms of the person deliberately trying to manipulate you, but a way of dealing with this, when you feel that you don't take responsibility yourself, the way to deal with the surface emotions is to try to regulate them when you don't take responsibility yourself, it's actually by handing them over to each other and the way to regulate it is if you then also say well, you're right about that too, it was also terrible of me I did it you know then the other person relaxes but the problem is that if it's not right of course if you have come to joking without the overtakers and you then get the insight god damn right it was mine you have to fucking apologise then of course you have to do it then it is j then it is j then the other one has just marked a boundary so hey you violated my boundary you become aware of it you definitely apologise but sometimes you know that you have the long in you know you have the right to this. You have the right to say no thank you. You have the right to go your own way. You have the right to get married your own way. You have the right to do this. You have the right to be in the extended family in the way you want. Or you have the right to be in your own family in the way you want. You have the right to put your different variants into play that really have nothing to do with your parents or your friends or girlfriends or whatever, but that you feel that they trigger it. So they trigger on it and they sometimes trigger so much that they have to try to subconsciously get you to change your behaviour so that they can relax. And that's where you have to hold on knowing that you're risking the relationship. And that's why you'll sometimes find that you know you're entitled to this and you also know that they're projecting. They are trying to force something into you because it is so unbearable in them but you give in. Sometimes you give in to the pressure because you know that if I stand firm here, it's actually very conceivable that the person can't handle it and therefore I won't actually have a relationship with them anymore. So that's why it feels very intense and that's also why the conscience sometimes creeps in, because that's how you try to be worth it against losing a relationship. Sometimes you just have to risk it and you have to put the relationship on the line, right? And no offence, but it might just be that you really, really want the person. You just don't want the behaviours you have together. You actually want you to find a new place to interact from. And they meet in a new way where there is more freedom to be, that you set each other more free to be them in. And this is where the guilt comes into play because sometimes we use guilt to hold each other in place. Because sometimes we can't handle change. We can't handle growing because the fear of losing what we don't know can be so great, can really be very, very deep in the nervous system. So that's also just to say that there are big things at stake here. So it's no wonder you react. And it's no wonder you react when you feel guilty. Because it's not just these little vibrations. There are often deep, profound things at play, like you're figuring out who you are. You may need to understand place. You may need to delineate yourself in a new way in your relationships. Um, and that's Sometimes you'll find that a guilty conscience is definitely being pushed into you. And you will also experience, maybe you're already sitting here now and you've realised that God, that you have pressed a guilty conscience into others that you never wanted. People you care a lot about, you might realise that you've come to press it into them. I've actually come to push my unresolved feelings into them with the wish that they would take care of them, because I couldn't do it myself. And the pain that it also hurts. It hurts like hell to realise. And the best thing you can do if and when you realise it, because I don't think any of us are going to miss it. I mean, we're all going to experience that at different times. It's actually being with that pain as like you're with the worst wildh and and dare to follow it and just say f*** I didn't like that. I didn't know I didn't know that's what I was going to do. And then if it's relationships where you can feel your heart that it can heal and soothe that you go back and share your insight but at the same time where you set the person free to have that attitude to share an insight. Whether the person wants to interact with it outside of your relationship or a person just says thank you, but I I go other ways. So if we go back with new realisations that we have come to transgress people, then we have to come with a form of enormous fin we have to come with awareness if we want to set them free. So I share this piece with you because I want to apologise and I want to show you that I didn't know I was hurting at the time. I know that now. I'm sorry for that. And then it's up to the person themselves what they want to do with it and whether it helps or not. Now that I've said this, why don't you want to see me? Now that I've told you this, why don't you know and it has to be clear that there is a requirement for the person to meet with you. And that's really what you want. It's also a deep longing you have in you if you've given birth to someone who pressurised a guilty conscience or pressured you to take care of their immaturity. What you really want is for them to come and say God, I can see that I've hurt them. You have to apologise for that. Where you still have the right to say thank you but I don't think we should just continue the journey as some friend or whatever it might be, or that you say that: ‘Okay, I'm really grateful for that and I look forward to getting to know you again.’ So we have to have a uh we have to, if we want love, love in the sense that it's something different than having these business relationships where we use relationships and we allow ourselves to be used in relationships. If we want to raise it to a higher octave, so that it actually becomes us expanding in love, then we also need to set people free. We need to give them the freedom to go their own way. Just as we also have the right to go our own way. In this way, love and freedom are very much connected. We've reached half past three and this is where I usually say the last half hour is for questions, so I think you might have written a little bit in there already. Otherwise, if you have a question, it's you are You're a small group, a small summer holiday group, so it's really just about using the time. I'll keep going until there are no more questions or until we finish in 12, right? And I'm just going to grab my big fat index finger, because it works better than when I'm in the group. I think something was written in here, and otherwise you're welcome to just write. I write, it's a bit like spreading out the percentages of time that are not running in motherhood all the time and walking with a perpetual guilty conscience. Yes, I think what you write was what I mentioned about how for some people the guilty conscience hits so hard that it seems to fill 95% of the time. So it's very rare to experience not being in a guilty conscience. And it's true, it can really sink in so deep. And while I find out if there are any questions that you can just write in there right now, I can give you a few tips on how to work with it when you're overwhelmed by the bad conscience. There's the one about following the condition, which is really nice, but then it's about if a bad sweat comes up again and again and again that you deal with it. Sometimes we have a bad burn because we want to do something about it. It can be a bad burn because we don't treat our body well enough. And that, in turn, is soon to be a pain in the arse. If you're not if your if you're badly sweating that you're not treating your body well enough, then you can pretend, I have to run 5 kilometres every day, and then I can only eat carrots and stuff like that. It's too much. You can't go from and maybe not focus on your body at all or what survival is to that. So it's something with quite easy you, maybe you walk half an hour each of that day and then soon gently. And there's a question here. I'll just take that. Um, I sometimes find that the more I learn about what's beneficial for my child, the easier it is for me to be aware of when I can't do those things. With the thought that if I do, I'm harming my child. It's not useful, but it's how I get it. Especially around when I get angry because I'm still learning about self-anger, and when I dismiss her feelings because I've caught my own. I'm like, yeah. And you're absolutely right about that. There's such a, there's such a peculiar paradox here that the more we know, and we're living right now, that we have extremely much knowledge. We have a huge amount of knowledge, especially about children and attachment and emotions and all that. We have an insane amount of knowledge. And it's become everyone's favourite, you could say. And it sure as hell wasn't like that when I was a kid. I mean, there was this kind of ignorant blah blah blah blah, so it's just sausage and stuff like that and good night and sleep well and it didn't bother me, and you're absolutely right that it's also because you're up against two completely different systems in what it means to be a human being. You have your mind, your wonderful mind that can read and understand. So that means that when you read and understand what is it when we freak out on our children and how does the child experience and stuff like that? You understand it completely. You can even remember how you experienced it. You understand the logic. And you can completely understand it. But then you also have a very old nervous system, which, you know, is a bit more stuck, you know, it's not so mac intuitive, it's not something that what you take in with your mind and understand it completely translates into all the cells. So now I've read it and understood it, so now I'm just like this, you're up against a nerve centre imprinted for many hundreds of thousands of years and imprinted for survival. So that means that going and meeting with care and understanding it requires the higher functions of the brain and also the higher functions of the nervous system, but the nervous system has been coded to survive as soon as it smells a little bit of alarm and every time it goes into survival mode, what comes up? It releases stress hormones. And how does it come up? The anger threshold. So we struggle with the fact that when we're under the pressure of everyday stress, and when we've heard a lot of noise from children and things like that, we get angry because our body feels like it's in emergency mode. So you have a mind that understands things like this, can think outside the box, can make cool films, can imagine other universes, you know, give it can't imagine. And then we have a much more limited nervous system, which yes, can be influenced and developed. But it's a bit like turning a rooster ship with a TSG. Shut up, it takes a long time. So what I usually say to women here or to dad, if he's the one who turns up, there are starting to be a few dads, as I'm mainly female. Um, what I usually say is that you should kind of see it as if, if you just one out of 10 times, let's say you have a situation where you have, where you have a deep longing and a desire to meet your children without too much irritation and fear. And there are some peak times when it's just too much for you. It might be cuddle time, it might be dinner, it might be, you know, flight suit, car seat. We have these things that kind of recur, where we struggle, and we're typically in our own situations, which are like, holy shit, this is hard. If you manage to do something else just once out of 10, then you know, let the champagne corks fly. Because you've not only gone up against your own life story, what you've faced, but you've gone up against the whole evolution. That's a big deal. It's huge. And then it's back on the horse again. Then over time maybe over time it starts to be so it changes as well because your child gets older. So some of the things you triggered over you wouldn't trigger over anymore. I remember the thing about having a scream. I had a son who had to drive a car refused to sit in a car seat. So when I put him in and then before I got him distracted and got him into the car seat he would scream until he was released again. So it was a nightmare I was fighting sweat every single time. And I was like, I'm never going on a car holiday with him. No, he's almost 11 now. I never go on car holidays with him. He says he hates driving but he's grown out of it, you know, so some of those things that we really don't want to do, they grow out of. So you know, but then there will just be other things that trigger you. So that means you can keep doing this thing where you meet the impulse in you. You meet the anger impulse and you manage to do something else in the situation. There you have to say you leave another neuronal network, so you have another option. But what you get overwhelmed, so it chooses the Christmas carol track, which is the one that's been used the most, and not the new spinning track that's been laid. You'll see, if you do it over time, just the fact that you change it, lay down some nice tracks and then you might find that when you retire in this life you're down to those 10 times, well, it's only four times. Maybe it's four times, so maybe it's four out of the 10 times that you get caught by that s*** and then you take responsibility on the other side. So you've really come a long way in a lifetime in terms of what your child can take with you. So there's also something about really looking at this in a much longer perspective that goes beyond yourself. And that's really where you could say it's the spiritual element or the spiritual element. This is something that also helps to set the future free, so it's not just about your own personal history. I hope that it can help you a little, because that's the problem we're in and it hurts like hell. Everything you say about meetings and in-law meetings affects me so much that I can really feel the anger. When I had my son, everything my mother-in-law said in the time after he was born felt like an assault. What I did is withdraw from both my mum and mother-in-law. My mum is never going to look after my son. My mother-in-law has done it in emergency situations. Then I just get so lonely. It's probably not good either or I spend so much effort being in the company of both. What would you have done then? Yes, and you're absolutely right that there is such a degree of scaling within this. I experience it with all the women I've spoken to who are now I've been for how long have I had concessions? It's probably been 10, 11, 12 years or something like that. That's many, many hundreds of women. I would say that all women know about this when they have children, but there is a degree of scaling in it. So I would actually say some of it is about how good a relationship, how close do they feel with their mother and mother-in-law? Um, and that's very much what determines that they're only ever going to be s But it basically lands. It's like that, and there's a bit of a curveball, and you just have to say no to some things, it lands again. And then there's this thing about, well, what's in the luggage? Is there a trauma bag? Has there been neglect? Has there just been a not very nurturing attachment? Have you not really felt that close to either your mum or your mother-in-law, or do you think they've been very dominant? So if they are dominant women, and you are now stepping into being at home in yourself, then you will have to push back that dominance. You'll have to do that, you'll have to stop it for yourself. So there are some people who find it so hard that, especially the smaller the child is, they find it so overwhelming that they actually isolate themselves a bit. And you're absolutely right. Feeling isolated does the opposite. It makes you feel lonely. That's also what I experience. I counsel a lot of people both about how they make it work with the institution for their children and all the worries that come with that, as well as the worries and and issues that can lie in the home passports and that's kind of what I see it feels a bit like choosing between two extremes either I choose the full package with institutions everything that is there and I have a complete hamster wheel or I choose then I take everything home and then I'm left with everything myself and have almost no money not it feels a lot like a split it feels like there are only two options and some of that is true because it's kind of like if you can't get a part-time job and if and you can't really get a part-time institution place and stuff like that so there's also something in the structure that makes it seem to be very split up right and it's kind of the same here you're in you're kind of like phew so much overtime, when I'm with you guys. But the fact that if I don't do it, you won't have any relief, and you'll feel very alone. I know a lot of people, I know a lot of people who, uh, eat a little bit of that, so they walk on eggshells about it, because they think it's better to have the relief, and then there are some things they let slide, and then work with it. And then I also know someone who says it's not possible. So I just have to face it myself and try to network with friends or others we can bring in as family, but it can be true. So right where you are, if you had a condition, I would try to get inside you and say, what is it that you feel here? Because you can feel some things very strongly when you're a new mum. You can feel it, and you'll be extremely annoyed if your grandmother or mother-in-law or mum just says something like this: ‘Well, shouldn't she wear a hat?’ Well, you can feel attacked. Very easily. Feel attacked because you're trying to find your footing as a mum, so you also and what we can see brain-wise, it's very interesting. There was a brain woman neuroscientist who had looked at before and after of women who were before pregnancy and then after birth. And it was 100% all women. What we get is a huge change in our brain when we become mothers. And it's actually the younger your offspring is, the more helpless your offspring is, the more you're in the limbic system, the more you're in your survival instinct. So a lot of women also feel quite anxious when they are young children. And if we look at a visionary hypothesis about why it is the brain does this, which then seems to land, the more independent and mobile the child becomes, um, at least they land that way neurologically, unless women have felt trapped and traumatised, then of course it's a different situation. But developmentally, all women, depending on who they are and so on, some will feel it more than others, but all women will actually have a little latent tendency to feel very anxious. And the smaller the offspring is. I mean her child is, the younger her child is, the more helpless. And it seems to you to be because the child doesn't know, and the female body doesn't know there's a bottle, and there's a man who can take bars and stuff. Biology doesn't know that. So, you know, we were actually created so that the baby couldn't survive, but it was very close to a breast and that mum therefore typically hears baby sounds more than dad does. So statistically speaking, dad doesn't actually hear as much baby crying as mum does. And actually if you compare a man who has children and a man who doesn't have children, the man who has children will hear baby crying. But the one who doesn't have kids he heard he heard he heard he didn't fucking hear you know. So having children affects us a lot. It does something to our instincts. It does something to us and it has to do something to us because we have to deal with the overwhelming nature of dealing with this. So what I wanted to look at here and what you might be able to do following this consultation now is to feel into like, what is your past? Are there any of these things where you feel that you might react a little strongly to something that you perceive as criticism, which is not criticism, because it might mean that your mum and your mother-in-law, they don't know what to do, and then there's already a distance because they're afraid of it, and they're frustrated about it, they can't figure out how to speak, I don't have the tools to try to meet you. Erm, so that could be an option. It can be your own contribution to coming to this, that you get very, very angry at them over small things, where you can actually say to them I know that you can actually in vulnerability say like okay I can feel when you say that it triggers me it's my own but it's just there I'm f****** vulnerable conversely, being tricked over small things can also mean that it can reactivate some boundary crossing that you think your parents have done something with your mum or you nog some it may be reminiscent of some things, where she hasn't been there for you, it may be that you have some unresolved things between you, so sometimes it can also be that sometimes I would actually say that what I hear when I realise in collaboration with the person or woman is that yes, loneliness, feeling alone is perhaps better than being with someone, because there is so much unresolved, which will muddy the waters so extremely much. And that, but that's not every case. So that, that's the thing about, that's again the feeling state, what the hell are you hiding under? Underlying that you feel abandoned, underlying that you think your mum hasn't been there for you, or you felt she's been too dominant. So she again, if you take surface frustration and and and feel deeper and maybe talk to your grandmother in the way you can about these things and meet them in vulnerability it can release something but it's also about here I will always ask the woman sitting across from me can you really communicate with those in vulnerability, it's abused because they are damaged themselves so there it's more to get a full understanding of where you stand and I hope this may have given you a little bit of ideas for what you can work on to find your way forward also that sometimes things land again, and you realise like well, you know what, I'll get them so I'll give them over maybe a little more candy than you would have done and stuff like that, but it's okay, it's the small stuff, it doesn't matter. She has her own way of giving love, and we shouldn't mess with that. But there are some things where you're like, no, that won't work. I mean, you can't just leave my baby crying, or I don't trust you to nurse. You might not say it, but you might not let your child spend the night with you until they get older and can say no. There can be different ways of approaching it, depending on where you land in terms of how much you want to work to maintain the relationship and contribute to it. Um, and those are some answers that kind of have to land in you. And it will also be based on where you are and what your history is, both with your mum and with your home life. But there's no doubt that we can get pushed away because we're so vulnerable with our toddlers. And it can frustrate us a lot if we've said, no, I want to avoid my child for sugar, and then, you know, they've bought sweets or something. And sometimes you can also see that they're practising, they're trying. Sometimes they'll really try and it's a nice bar and you're like, well, there's a lot of fructose in there. Now you've just given it five fine bars. But that's the thing about knowing that sometimes you can see with almost, okay, they're actually trying and no, my child won't die from two candy canes, but it's just really knowing that the younger your child is, the more vulnerable you will be, the bigger reactions you will have to even small things. But it's not necessarily just small things. There may well be more to what you find offensive that makes you feel you need to withdraw. And that's why you need to find out what it is, and then land in a place where you're like, okay, I'm going to stop, I'm going to pull back a bit, or I'm going to start opening up a bit. You'll feel the impulse when you go deeper into the state, so it's easier for you to feel the impulse to decide whether it's one way or the other that you need to go. Just for now. OK, OK, OK, OK. My mum refused to call my son's name for three months because she thinks it's so ugly. She got my demented grandmother to call me and beg me to find another name. She lectures me on how important it is to learn to let go of my child after eight weeks because she wants to look after him. She says yes. OK, OK, OK. I can understand that. If you want to do that, you have to be really, really firm that it's f****** up. And it's not that I'm saying your mum is f****** up, but I'm saying the behaviour she's trying to push into you is f****** up. Because she doesn't respect. She doesn't respect that name. She can have her thoughts about a name, but there's no reason to say it to you. There isn't one either. And she has to respect that you're a woman in your own right who doesn't want to go her own way. And then there's the thing about letting go of your child at eight weeks. You could have your mum look after your eight-week-old child for a few hours and stuff like that, but it would only make sense if you're comfortable with it, and I don't think you are. And secondly, she's trying to push you to be a certain way. So that's exactly the kind of thing you'll have to stand firm on. And then it could be that she grows out of it and puts something on you, or if she keeps doing you wrong, then I can understand why you feel that you need to back off. Um, there's something here. I can often see it from above but not snap out of it, even though I can say it to myself in the meantime. Ah, that's the thing about getting caught up in the anger. It's a wild experience. Because it's true. I mean, it's so interesting. You can actually And you hear so many women saying, they can see, they can see, okay, this is going to happen, and then if I do this, then do that, and then we end up there. You can see, you can see it as if you're watching a train wreck in slow motion. You can see it, but you can't stop it. It's as if your nervous system has run away with you, while you still have your knowledge bank and your experience of how things go wrong. But it's so seductive to snap. It's so seductive to let the nervous system take over that we can't stop it. It's a It's a wild, it's a wild place to be and experience it and hugely confusing. And I think if we look at the longer term, we should probably look back to, I think we're about to be maybe the first generation, at least right here in Denmark, where we actually start to be able to do that. The fact that we're even aware that it's train slow motion is a step. Because before it was completely unconscious. If we go further back, the children had to be beaten and locked up, and they had to be caned, and you couldn't really feel what you were doing. You couldn't feel how horrible you were causing the child's pain, which was the child's own, so you didn't even allow it to happen because we caused it. So what we've actually come to now, which is actually a wild development when you look at it evolutionarily, is that while we're going to inflict pain that we don't want, we know that we're doing it. And it's f****** uncomfortable. But rather that, because for those of you who have had a narcissistic employer or have narcissism close or otherwise, these defences where the person keeps projecting and making you wrong by putting and accusing us accusing you of something that is not in the context of the company with reality, but where the person doesn't even know it or in like a psychopath where the person is calculating and wants to use you and has no empathy. It's extremely uncomfortable. It's hugely uncomfortable. It's insanely uncomfortable. So it's actually important that we start being able to witness what we do. Even if we're not always there to stop it. But then there's this. When we don't manage to stop it, we can still realise that phew, I would like to handle this situation differently. I want you to be that trick. When we get out of the trickery, what we can do is to go back and take responsibility for children coming here. But you're right. I got really angry and I shouted really loud. I apologise for that. It must have been really uncomfortable and it must have been really unpleasant. This is where we can allow our children to be angry. They may have a fight or flight response that they want to say, they want to shout and become furious. We can do that, we can colour it just like that of course I can understand why you were scared. And when you get scared, we want to shout. I can understand that. And then suddenly it lands again and we're connected. So you can work on both tracks. You can work on the track that says that sometimes you actually manage a situation to the best of your ability. And then other times it goes completely up in smoke, but you fix it. Because if we go back and look at the previous generations, they didn't manage to do both. They didn't have the time, the awareness wasn't there, the knowledge wasn't there, there were many things that weren't there. Firstly, they didn't manage to see many of these things for what they were, of course, that is, they also felt things. Every generation has had desires and longings and pains in relation to bringing children into the world. It's completely implicit. It's just something that each generation has taken to a deeper level. So that is to say, some of the things that were perpetrated against children were forms of behaviour that were actually transgressive and painful, which were not seen at the time. There was no awareness really, that was one thing. And then the other thing was that the parents had no idea what to repair. So that is to say, when there was a huge kerfuffle, or they had been let go, or something had happened, they had no idea what to do. And when the guilt and shame hit them, they couldn't get past the split. So they could say, either it's your fault or it's my fault. Then finally, the parent would break down screaming. Well, I'm a terrible mum and dad too. It's absolutely awful too. And it makes the child make some expressions or it's like, I'm sorry I shouted at you, but it was also because you were pushing me and you were so then the child gets the blame. Or the third one where you try to be neutral. In other words, there's a huge row and you do nothing. That's not saying anything at all. So just pretend like it didn't happen, you know, those were the variants. These are the variants we've had up until now. I would say up here, up to where you could say that psychological practice and therapeutic practice have become more commonplace, where you have a little bit that even the people who have never been to a psychologist. In Denmark, they know that you have to try to talk about the feelings on the other side, right? So what it's become, it's been collectively spread out into the water, and it's very, very healthy, and it's very, very good. But it also means that you'll have experiences where you feel like this is going over the edge, and I can see it all playing out, but I'm just going to play it out anyway. And it's extremely confusing. So I hope that you can see the bigger picture, that it would actually have been inhumane for you. It would almost be an impossible premise to reckon with, because you put yourself in some of your nervous system then also changes accordingly. It takes a long time. So really have some gentleness with you here. Those were the questions. And there's a few minutes left. I think I just want to say a few last words of advice about this whole changing mode thing. It's sometimes, if you're if you've ended up being hugely overwhelmed by a guilty conscience and you have and you have you have that thing about following it.

  Even if you've followed the feeling all the way you've realised should I act on it, should I not act on it. So you've kind of concluded something from it. You've dealt with that first. That's why it's not always possible for the bad one to go away. Someone can sit in your system and almost as if you can't get rid of such a bitch. And it's all about learning to switch modes, because sometimes it goes round and round in your head and then it affects your body. So what you can do is to have a little pleasure drawer. So you know how you have things that allow you to switch modes. So that is, when you're caught up in a guilty conscience. It can be good to move your body. Put on music that you naturally move your body to have some favourite literature. Watch something really funny that makes you laugh because laughter releases laughter. Of course, you shouldn't just put on something fun to go out and drink yourself silly and watch something funny and you bad so we without taking care of it. But it's like if you feel like okay this is just noise I've just been affected and I'm in a vulnerable place and now I suddenly think I have to be everything I'm not supposed to be because I've taken in too much of all sorts of flavours or whatever it might be you can feel like okay this doesn't benefit me and I can't really use it any more so you can work on letting it go so then have a list of good jokes or good movies that you either cry badly or laugh really hard at, because it helps with the regulated system. Beauty, uh, good friends, caring, bathing, dancing, uh, or taking an ice cold bath. The body can't be trapped in such chronic anxiety and then be cold at the same time. It also resets. So it's like having a little first aid kit when you're trapped in this to take care of yourself. Er, where you can drop into the natural things in the body that help you regulate. It was great to meet you guys. Thank you for today.